Words And Their True Meaning

According to its traditional definition as the literary quality of seeming true-to-life, this question lacks verisimilitude.

After Tornado's response, are you feeling decimated?

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/decimate

Most people use the term in the sense of 'utterly destroy', but in actuality it means removing just one-tenth. The term originally comes from a method of punishment used in the Roman army.

'Decimate' is also a technical term meaning to downsample a digital signal, effectively throwing away some of the information content in exchange for some benefit such as faster transmission speed or reduced storage requirements. Can be temporal signal (an audio stream, say) or a spacial signal, such as an image - or both (a video).

CR4 decimates uploaded images, for instance. Lord knows why - especially on an engineering site - but they've always done this (I dunno, maybe to save space on their original server's 20 MB hard drive but, whatever the original reason, the need for it has long since passed). What started out as a nice, hi-rez image ends up looking like it's being viewed through a steamy bathroom window and so, in this sense, 'decimate' gives 'utterly destroy' a bit of verisimilitude - at least here, on this site, as regards image detail.

You have found one of my pet peeves, people who use "decimate" in place of "devastate".

I think our failure to adopt the metric system is a contributing factor to this misuse of "decimate".

There are many words used differently, spell differently and let us not forget pronunciation differences. Which is why I talk about English and American!!

My favourite is "momentarily", which has quite a different meaning in each language.

Here is the Oxford definitions for both languages:-

Definition of momentarily in English:adverb

1For a very short time: as he passed Jenny's door, he paused momentarily
2North American At any moment; very soon: "my husband will be here to pick me up momentarily"

Language is one of my great interests....

• mer·e·tri·cious/ˌmerəˈtriSHəs/ adjective
1. apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity.
2. of, relating to, or characteristic of a prostitute.
"When I was young I always knew, the meretricious (over unity) from the true (thermodynamics)" 1

With apologies to Ogden Nash

3. of, relating to, or characteristic of policitians and prostitutes.

"No new taxes."

Harry Truman saw little difference between being a politician and being the piano player in a house of ill repute.

I didn't know Harry was also a musician.

SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPILAIDOCIOUS... Ask Mary Poppins!

SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPILAIDOCIOUS... Ask Mary Poppins!

I think that Mary spelled it correctly though.

The verisimilitude of meretricious posts, have decimated the reliability of this forum.

Lol!!

Having excogitated, my bellwether friend, you have been an example of circumlocution and a sesquipedalian for the purpose of gasconading.

Modern interpretation.... Very similar dude....

LOL (that's "laughing out loud" by the way).

When an acronym is so widely used and known does it stop being an acronym and become a word itself?

Some times; that happened to the Jeeps in WW II, they started as General Porpuse vehicles, then they were referred to simply as G.P.s, until it contracted in Jeeps.

When I first started posting on the web, so long ago, I thought that LOL meant Living on Love! Sort of a solidarity credo...I really didn't catch on until the ROFL started being used and certain sites started posting popular acronym meanings....Yeah it was used so much it really didn't have any meaning.....I mean if you were laughing out loud as much as you claimed, let's face it you had a serious problem.....

You mean one of those Alphabetic Colocations for Reducing Or Numbing Your Memory becoming a word, like 'acronym,' just to save on typing?

I guess when the worlds dictionaries pick it up then.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/LOL?q=lol

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/bootylicious

The pervasive misunderstanding of 'peruse' is interesting. Most seem to think it means to look over without studying closely or in-depth. In fact, it means to study closely, thoroughly or in-depth.

I have always been partial to the word "sesquipedalian" as it is itself what it describes.

Sesquipedalianism is certainly alive on this thread.

Sesquipedalianism obfuscates pellucidity.

I wondered how long it would take for someone to post that little gem.

Gem? Gems -- other than opals -- are known for their transparency!

A methodology is not a method. The wannabe geniuses that I work with often misuse the word methodology. I guess the longer the word the less likely someone is to look it up.

I also had a co-worker who consistently used the word idealistically instead of ideally. Ideally he'd know what the difference was, but, being the idealist that he was, he ignored the difference and just sounded goofy.

The same with 'simplistic' in place of 'simple'.

What I found really annoying was my ex's consistent and extensive abuse of pronouns; he, she or it - you were never quite certain to whom or what each referred, even within the same sentence.

Also 'the':

"It's in the cupboard."

"We have twenty cupboards; which one is THE cupboard?"

She would also throw any old word in that sounded like it might work, instead of chosing the proper word or phrase to convey her actual meaning (there is a huge difference between 'lightning' and 'lightning bug,' for instance, but explaining the need to be more succinct proved futile). Conversations with her were often punctuated by 'Twenty Questions' guesswork, by necessity; it was exhausting.

As a native English speaker she knew surprisingly little about the language and its correct application. My guess is that, with her, effective communication was never a priority.

You are doing so much better now--congratulations!

Why, thank you, Maelstrom-san!

My German wife does the same in German......can be very annoying.....

If mine did it German, we'd probably still be married - I don't speak German.

Lol!!

When were fist together, I spoke poor German, and my wife even less English! We could not argue! A really great time.

Our house \ family language remains German, though all of us are very fluent in English as well for many years now.

My grandson at 3.5 years can count in both languages.

Receiving UK Sat TV has helped enormously my wife and children.

I must start a discussion on WHEN to start teaching a child a second language, as I have seen some rally dreadful, life changing, errors made!

But in a fresh blog only.

In bilingual families who speak in both languages at home, I suppose children start learning both from Day 0. It's all new to them and they don't think of the words as being from different languages - the concept of a 'language' is completely foreign to them; it's just what mum & dad speak!

When I worked with Japanese engineers I'd mix English, Spanish and Japanese together just to tease them. "Chotto matte momento" - "One moment, please." They started doing it, too, and new arrivals from Japan would just look at us like we were effing nuts lol.

UVery few people have ability to learn 2 or more languages starting very young, and to later keep them apart WHEN WRITING!!!!

I have known about 35 such children and seen their exam results in those languages learnt in childhood. Catastrophic.

Now I am not saying every child in the world with 2 or more languages learnt as baby has this problem, but the percentage must be very very low who manage it well. I have never ever met one. Parents try and cover it up, but here you cannot get a decent job without at least fluent German, but you need English too really. That is with no mistakes of the wrong language words in your writing, for exams. My kids started in the school at nine to learn English. They are accent free, both have also got business English, one is learning Cantonese for business.

A big problem is that people with only one language are easily impressed!

If you talk to educationists first as I did, this method is NOT recommended. It is best to concentrate on the language needed outside of the home as the primary language and only speak that till (my best guess after 34 years of experience) at least 6 years old....

Mine started at 9 to learn English, which was when the schools started teaching the language, they did not learn English from me.

German is to my mind the hardest language to learn in Europe, just my opinion. 3 ways to say "you" (Sie, Du and Ihr) and three genders, male female and neutral are just the start!! Der, Die and Das!!!

Then for example you have a "male" boy, but a "neutral" girl!!! WHY???? SO EVEN GUESSING IS NO HELP!!!

The the word "the" in German for a female is "die" and so is the "the" for plural, even for male or neutral items!!!

So my decision was also helped by the fact that to learn German from the cradle was a great start, and any A***hole can pick up English!!! Seriously!!! We here all did it.

French, Spanish and Italian are several orders of magnitude easier to learn....

My daughters are 29 and 31 years old, and I have to pat myself on the back that both are totally bilingual (and passed all and every exam in either language not only in the schools, but also in their careers too) and can write either language without adding in words from the other....as people who have learnt both together, as you mentioned, tend to do in almost all cases.(all that I have known!)

Simply put, they learnt two languages as one and cannot separate them.

I remember asking a friend of mine's son Timmy, bilingual from birth in English and German, he spoke both really well, what was "Auto" in English. He could not answer "car" as he should have done as he could not translate.

You need two definite separate languages to translate from and to. He had one "BIG" language.......it really gives kids and later adults a completely un-fixable problem.

Timmy failed every single English and German exam in the school, but did well in almost all other subjects, including French, physics, chemistry to name but a few.....he is now a Gardner....as any technical job here requires German and usually English as well here.....sadly for him!!

As I recently said, I do believe (but never the parents!!) that some children, somewhere have handled it. But I have never ever met any and I have known a lot of mixed marriages.....and well over 30 children, who learnt all at least two languages from birth, several of them had three......

The languages were, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Turkish and German.....

It made no difference as to which languages were combined....none of those children was able to pass exams in those languages that they learnt together from birth, but often in others learnt later in the school for example...

I have looked around on the web and all the so called "knowledgeable" people appear to ONLY talk about speaking and completely fail to address writing skills needed to pass any exam. Here 70% or the final exam mark is generated by written questions, NOT BY SPEAKING!!! Where by all of the bi and trilingual children I have known were fluent and lucid and did not make any mistakes whilst speaking in any of their languages!!

The failure is ONLY with the written part of any exam.....completely forgotten by the "experts!"

Even some professors do not think about this side of the problem (all of the ones I have found on YouTube for example.

Also, those professors all look to be less than 35 years old and to really "see" the problems caused, you need to know the children for (my guess) at least to 15 years old! Most of the "know-it-alls" are too young to have had such long term experience!!!

Which is where at least I believe, part of the problem lies.

Here in Germany for example, the most common children with such writing problems are of Turkish origin.....thats where many teachers (who understand the problems FAR better), have had direct experience and knowledge....

Everyone must live how he feels he should, and also stand up and be counted when things go wrong.

So I took my children's possible future language problems to heart and did not "bet" on a good outcome, they learnt/spoke ONLY German till they were around 9 years old and both could speak reasonable English (Holidays in GB!) within a few months, FAR AHEAD OF THEIR CLASSMATES BY YEARS!!

My Mother complained (a lot) that she could not talk to them!!

Both children were both able to help and correct their German born English teachers in the language, shortly after starting.......!! DUUUHHHH!

Hello Andy! I am sorry to say I do not completely agree with you: I grew up in Argentina, in a family were 3 languages were spoken (German, Spanish and English) ... None of us has had any problems at school (at least, not because for being multilingual!). To us it was clear that the grandparents spoke German, our parents English and the "outside world" Spanish. This probably helped us to clearly differentiate each language and to learn it as a separate "entity".

"of" instead of "for"

That is possibly a German thinking "leftover"....

I never mentioned them as they are usually far more complicated to explain....I have done the same/similar..... DUUHHHH!

Very, very seldom does it work out as well as you have it.

I have worked with adults from time to time who professed to be completely Bilingual, but when you got an email, you could see both languages, es for it, und for and etc.. They simply could not see where they had gone wrong....

Count yourself very lucky....

I have the problem with English and American. I tend to American on an American website, English on a British site. I even find myself shifting on here when replying to one of our British members.

Ah yes, England and America, two countries so alike, but eternally separated by a common language.

oxymoronˌ

äksəˈmôrˌän / noun

1. a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction (e.g.,faith unfaithful kept him falsely true ).

Some examples I like are:

• Old babe
• Controlled burn
• Military intelligence

Great comments and words, I like all the posts, even the first one!!

Yes, all worth the read, but to put it in the words of the great "Foth" it was really helpful in muddifying the fuzzication of the obscurization of the language.

LOL!!

My mum used to say that my brother was "intoxicated by the exuberance of his own verbosity".

I have noticed a recent increase, or perhaps I should say, I have recently noticed an increase in the use of "myself" where "me" or "I" would be correct.

For a single word, I choose "antidisestablishmentarianism".

As this thread goes on, I'm reminded of an old story:

An English professor was talking to his class about negative modifiers, "In English, two negatives in the same sentence will make a positive. "She isn't unpretty" means the same as "She is pretty." In other languages, multiple negatives in the same sentence combine to make a single negative. But in no language can two positives be combined to make a negative."

As he finishes his speech, a student looks up from her notes at him and says, "Yeah, right."

In Argentina, during a conversation we have the tendency of starting a reply by saying "No", even if what comes next is has a positive meaning. We are used to it, and don´t pay attention... but foreigners get upset, as "no" means "NO" in most languages.

Just noticed that if one replyes to an OT, we automatically get rated as OT -5 as well !!!! weird!

That's because logically, there is very little that can be said about an OT post to bring it back on topic, so the system assumes that once a post is self-marked as OT, it will continue to be OT.

TIRES = TYRES

REPLIES = REPLYES?

Just to justify the misspelling!

TIRES = America

TYRES = English

REPLIES = American/English

REPLYES? = Rubbish, totally wrong in either language..

I did not understand the points you are trying to make. Please explain.

Hi Andy,

"I did not understand the points you are trying to make. Please explain."

As I stated in the third line of my post, I was trying to justify the mispelling of "replies" by playing with the semantics, and giving as exaple the word tires, whcih can be written either way...

I actually read that post for a second time a while after the "editing time" had expired)

You really need to learn how to use the spellchecker on CR4 as what you write is really bad. I still do not understand what you were trying to achieve, as I left my crystal ball at the office!!

Look at what you just wrote, I will underline all the words wrongly spelt and found by the spellchecker:-

--------------------------------------------------

Hi Andy,

"I did not understand the points you are trying to make. Please explain."

As I stated in the third line of my post, I was trying to justify the mispelling of "replies" by playing with the semantics, and giving as exaple the word tires, whcih can be written either way...

I actually read that post for a second time a while after the "editing time" had expired)

--------------------------------------------

"Tyres" is the English spelling, "tires" is the American way its spelt!! The spellchecker is American, so it flags the English version.... Also you should use an open and a close brackets.....

Try checking what you write far more carefully than you do now and do use the spellchecker....it will help you.

Well, mispellings are the price one pays for posting on a hurry from the cell phone!

Even with forgetting the misspellings, it still made no sense to me.....sorry.

Maybe someone else understood it better.....I think in German.....